No, that’s not how associations tend to work in the US. Very likely he came from an association in an adjacent field and is essentially the conduit to Leadership and in charge of executing their strategic plan and such. He is not paid by the companies is individuals directly he is paid by the association. If they don’t do well collectively he is probably out and would be working somewhere else potentially entirely unrelated.
In associations longtime professionals tend to work with the same sorts of groups, but very often their jobs and those of the Members are entirely unrelated and the specialization is more due to connections and being able to say you understand how to work with those sorts of people.
For example I have been working mostly with research scientists most of my career at at this point. I have no background in science, but I have a lot of contacts with people who work for scientific associations and I can say that I an very used to their personalities and have a record of success I can point at. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t go do a fine job for realtors or something since the jobs would be basically the same, but that I landed here and it’s the easiest fit at this point. K
I mean, they’ve gotten way better at it, but most of their equipment and doctrine are still targeted at utterly destroying a near peer level threat. The f-22 wasn’t designed to fight insurgents, nor is it suited to that task.
I would think that the USAF would happily establish and easily enforce a no fly zone over Ukraine and could probably pull it off within a few days of getting the order conservatively.
There was the story a few years ago when a well equipped and trained Wagner battalion “accidentally” picked a flight with a US army unit or base in Syria and got immediately demolished.
Writing this out definitely feels like braggadocio and it likely is. But I would think the Russians don’t want to find out why we don’t have universal healthcare first hand.